Honda’s Robot-Rebrand Shifts into Second
Last year I wrote that interaction designers will soon find themselves expanding the craft to mediate human-robot experiences, where the instructions of software become physical actions in the real world.
Consider how computers entered our lives across a few decades: first as far-away leviathans in research labs, then to lonely occupants of special rooms in companies, then to every desk and now to every pocket. Here, there, then suddenly everywhere, and robots seem poised to follow the same curve.
I’ve been waiting to see signs of this wave touching the shore of mass culture, and that happens in a new commercial from Honda. Have a watch.
Honda has not hidden its interest in robotics, with Asimo visiting conferences and other press-heavy events, but has always relegated it to the realm of ‘just research’. With this ad, that gradual rebranding shifts gears, gently humanizing Asimo with Canadian interests, getting us used to the idea of a robot from Honda as part of our lives.
Over the holidays, I decided to make 2009 a year to explore the more physical side of interaction design. That thought is largely inspired by the Touch platform found in the iPhone and iPod Touch, and to some extent in the 